Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Document Notes
Analyzing the results of a historical study about societies and how they deal with crises, utilizing a large dataset.
Highlights
id796505389
While the median duration of a crisis is 22 years, the range is between < 1 year and 200+ years. There is also no typical outcome of a crisis. While around 50% of the crises end in some kind of civil war, there are a lot of other outcomes which can also also be observed (Figure 1). These outcomes are also often combined and a crisis can have a variety of different outcomes at once. Quite relevant to this living literature review, only around 5 % of crises result in some kind of collapse.
Figure 1: Consequences of crises and their occurance ra
id796505440
If a revolution happened, in 65% of the cases reforms followed, while if no revolution happened, reform only followed in 23% of the cases. Interestingly, even in the revolution subset of the data, there is no correlation between crisis severity and number of reforms. This seems to indicate that revolutions make reforms more likely, even if the revolution did not lead to any major crisis afterwards.
id796505328
The major religions seem to make crises less severe, but only by a small amount.
id796505285
Still, their study also shows that too much bureaucracy is also not helpful and that parallel hierarchies make reforms more likely. To me this seems to indicate that somewhere in the space of hierarchies and state capacity there is a somewhat optimal range for reform and resilience
id796505271
State capacity: As mentioned above, the more state capacity you have the more you can prepare for crises and the quicker you can move resources once the crisis happens. However, you have to manage at the same time that the state is not made inflexible by an overly complex bureaucracy.
id796505267
Revolutions: One of the most fascinating results of this study is that revolutions seem to be one of the major drivers of reform. However, as there is no connection to the size of the crises, this seems to imply that the best way to push for reforms is to make a revolution, but somehow manage to keep the revolution under control, so it does not spiral into big turmoil.